


Baby, I’m not made of stone, it hurts

by Emjen_Enla



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: (basically the same level of implication as canon), (so much internalized arophobia), Aromantic Character, Aromantic allosexual character, Canon Compliant, Canon-typical language, Child Abuse, Codependency, Demiromantic Bisexual Tommy Shelby, Dubious Self-Care, Emetophobia, F/M, Gen, Headaches & Migraines, Implied/Referenced Pedophilia, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Internalized Arophobia, Kidnapping, M/M, Other, Parentification, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Prostitution, Self-Hatred, Tommy Shelby Needs a Hug, Traumatic Brain Injuries, arophobia, one instance of antiziganism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-22
Updated: 2020-02-22
Packaged: 2021-02-26 13:07:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 22,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22842025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emjen_Enla/pseuds/Emjen_Enla
Summary: Things with the Russians and Section D had started bad and ended worse, and that was before Polly, Arthur, John, and Michael went and got fucking arrested. Or Tommy Shelby grapples with loneliness, guilt, health issues, and romantic orientation in the aftermath of s3.
Relationships: Ada Shelby & Tommy Shelby, Grace Burgess/Tommy Shelby, Greta Jurossi/Tommy Shelby, Polly Gray & Tommy Shelby, Tommy Shelby & Lizzie Stark, Tommy Shelby & Mary, Tommy Shelby & None, Tommy Shelby/Alfie Solomons, Tommy Shelby/Freddie Thorne
Comments: 11
Kudos: 83
Collections: AroWriMo 2020





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week! Here, have 22K of angst because I’m incapable of writing anything else. This fic was written for @arowrimo, though I have ignored their prompts and used their fest as an excuse for a fic that’s been floating around in my head for months.
> 
> Warnings: Honestly basically everything you can think of. Read the tags, please.
> 
> Title from “Hurts” by Emeli Sandé.
> 
> Special thanks to @OceanShay for beta reading this fic and putting up with my inability to finish anything on a decent schedule (though in my defense I did not expect this to become my third longest fic on AO3 when I started it).
> 
> This fic started out life as an idea for a fic for @boundinshallows(museme87)’s Tommy x Alfie prompt fest. Eventually, I decided that fest was the wrong place for a fic like this. Who knows if this is the right place for it either, but we’re giving it a shot anyway.
> 
> Admittedly, some of the language might be a little ahistorical. I don’t know how to talk about sexuality—especially aro/ace sexuality—without using modern words and some basic understanding of the Split Attraction Model.
> 
> I’ll be completely honest; this fic is a literal cesspool of angst. I’m almost sorry for subjecting you all to it, but not sorry enough not to post it.

People made a lot of assumptions about Tommy Shelby. Hell, his own family made a lot of assumptions about him at times. Some assumptions were useful, others were just flat out annoying, and over the years Tommy had learned to ignore them and not bother wasting time correcting people.

One of the common assumptions people made about him was that he was a liar. That was not actually true, or at the very least, not very true. Tommy was actually a fairly dismal liar, though he could get away with it in situations where all he had to do was pretend to be serious until the other person decided that no one would be that serious about something if they didn’t intend to actually do it.

Unfortunately, this was one of the assumptions his family made about him, which was frustrating because Tommy didn’t actually lie to the family. If he didn’t want them to know something he simply didn’t bring it up or refused to answer questions about it. It was unfortunate the family had never managed to figure that out.

All this to say that while Tommy didn’t lie to the family, there were a lot of things that he’d never told them and had no intentions of ever telling them. One of them was that he liked men just like he liked women. Another was that until he’d been seventeen years old he hadn’t thought he could fall in love.

That was a bit of an oversimplification. It wasn’t just a matter of not falling in love. It was more that he hadn’t thought he got crushes. Sure, he found people—both women and men—attractive but there always seemed to be something missing. When people “caught feelings” as Polly liked to say, they always got soppy and wanted to spend as much time as possible with the other person, even if they didn’t know them and were in no way compatible. Tommy didn’t feel that way.

In fact, it had taken him a few years to even notice. Arthur was three years older than Tommy, so obviously he hit the sexual/romantic awakening stage before Tommy did. Unsurprisingly, he did it with the overwhelming intensity that was characteristic of all Arthur’s emotions. When Arthur had a crush, thoughts of that person consumed his every waking moment. They were all he could think about, so therefore they were all he could talk about. It drove Tommy—who already had enough on his plate as a kid who was basically parenting all his siblings—insane. He’d had enough trouble getting Arthur to do anything useful before he’d started mooning after girls.

The biggest fight Tommy and Arthur ever had was during in this period. Arthur had gone out to try to get the attention of some girl who worked in a shop when all Tommy had needed him to do was sit home with John and Ada—both of whom were sick—while Tommy saw to the delicate task of stealing medicine from the storerooms of Small Heath’s only doctor. Arthur obviously hadn’t stayed, and Tommy had come home to find that John and Ada had been left on their own for hours while burning up with fevers. Tommy had soothed them as best he could, fed them the medicine he’d brought, and then settled down to wait for Arthur. Arthur had come back hours later in a very good mood. Tommy hadn’t even given him a chance to start making excuses, he’d simply marched right up to him and punched him in the teeth.

The following fight knocked over most of the furniture in the kitchen, woken John and Ada, and drawn their father from where he’d been drinking in the betting shop. By the time he arrived, Tommy had Arthur pinned to the floor, something impressive given that he’d been half Arthur’s size at the time. If Polly had been the one to catch them they might have just gotten off with a strict lecture, but Arthur Shelby Sr. liked getting to lay down the law with his fists and belt. To make matters worse, he’d already figured out that his second son was smarter than he was, which was not something his ego could stand. When Arthur told their father Tommy had started it, Arthur Sr. was more than happy to dole out what he saw as an appropriate punishment. Tommy had never been able to figure out if Arthur knew what Tommy was angry about, or if what would happen to John and Ada if he didn’t do as Tommy said had never crossed his mind

With most other children relegated to the position of unnecessary distractions from the serious business of keeping two younger siblings and one older sibling alive, it was perhaps unsurprising that Tommy spent several years operating under the delusion that crushes where just another piece of Arthur’s nonsense and that everyone else approached relationships and attraction in a more sensible way.

Then there was Sara Walker.

Sara Walker was a girl from school. Tommy was not the one who had a crush on her; that was his best friend, Freddie Thorne. It took him an embarrassingly long time to realize that was what was going on. Freddie was much less dramatic about the whole thing than Arthur was. Tommy had been confused about why Freddie suddenly wanted to spend so much time hanging out with Sara, but he hadn’t grasped what was going on until one day on the way home from school when Freddie suddenly stopped walking and asked very seriously, “Tommy, I need your honest opinion; do you think Sara likes me?”

Tommy blinked in confusion. “Of course, she likes you,” he said. “You’re friends, aren’t you? Besides, Sara likes everyone: even me.” Tommy had something of a reputation of being an odd and sour child who preferred the company of horses to people. The fact that he’d been raising his siblings for years meant he was too mature for most children his age, as well. Neither of those things made one many friends.

Freddie rolled his eyes dramatically. “Quit playing dense, Tom, you know what I mean.”

Tommy did not in fact know what Freddie meant, and that must have shown on his face, because Freddie heaved a sigh. “Do you think she _likes_ me,” he said with heavy emphasis on the word like. “Like, boyfriend likes me.”

Tommy blinked again and cleared his throat. “Why does that matter?” he asked.

“Because I girlfriend like her, you idiot,” Freddie said, like Tommy was the one who had suddenly taken leave of his common sense not the other way around.

Tommy felt like someone had ripped the earth out from under his feet. He stared at Freddie while his understanding of the world reworked itself. “You can’t be serious,” he said.

Freddie gave him a look that was just as incredulous as the one Tommy was sure was on his face. “Of course, I’m serious,” he said. “Why wouldn’t I be?” When Tommy didn’t respond he shook his head. “What’s up with you? You’re acting like you’ve never heard of a crush before.”

_I just thought they were the sort of thing that only happened to people like Arthur._ He knew better than to say that, because something told him that wasn’t the right answer.

“I don’t understand you sometimes, Tom,” Freddie said. He was obviously able to tell this conversation was making Tommy uncomfortable, but didn’t seem to know why. “But tell me honestly; do you think Sara likes me?”

“Sure,” Tommy said. He wasn’t sure how you would tell if Sara did like Freddie, and he wasn’t about to ask.

“I think she does too,” Freddie said. He bit his lip. “Do you think I should tell her?”

“Yeah,” Tommy said, because that felt like the right thing to say.

Freddie nodded with an air of finality and lapsed into silence. Tommy let his shoulders relax. He was glad this conversation was over.

He’d relaxed too soon. “What about you?” Freddie asked.

Tommy immediately went tense again. “I don’t have a crush.”

Freddie groaned in the good-natured way he did when he was making a joke. It did not feel good-natured. “Don’t be that way, Tommy. Tell me who it is.”

“I don’t have a crush,” he repeated, his voice rising a little. “I never have.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Freddie said. “Everyone gets crushes. That’s how it works.” He paused and thought. “Actually, I’ll bet Mr. Hall has never had a crush. He’s soulless.”

Tommy winced. Mr. Hall lived next door to Freddie. He was old as dirt and twice as bad tempered. Tommy and Freddie hated him.

“The only people who don’t have crushes have something wrong with them, Tom,” Freddie went on, obvious to Tommy’s spiraling. “So, you’re not fooling me. Tell me who it is. It must be someone embarrassing.”

Tommy wasn’t sure what to say. He couldn’t continue insisting he’d never had a crush now that he knew that only soulless people didn’t have them, but it wasn’t like knowing that suddenly gave him a crush to offer up. He had to say something. _Just pick someone, _he told himself, searching his brain for a likely candidate. “Maggie Allen,” he got out.

“Oh, that’s not bad,” Freddie said. “Maggie’s really nice. I was starting to worry you were going to say someone like Doris Green. I don’t understand why you were so embarrassed to tell me you like Maggie.”

Tommy shrugged to avoid having to say anything more. Maggie Allen was pretty and smiled even more than Sara Walker did. Tommy also owed her because last winter she’d noticed Ada had no mittens and handed over one of her old pairs despite the risk that her parents would find out. Tommy had been trying to find a way to get her to let him pay her back ever since, but she kept refusing. Maggie was a super nice person and Tommy liked her…just not the way he’d just claimed to.

“You know, we should both tell them how we feel,” Freddie said. “Sara and Maggie, I mean. That’s what you’re supposed to do in this situation.”

“I think I’ll wait a while,” Tommy said, panic rushing through him. He needed to avoid that at all costs. “I’m not ready for her to know.”

Freddie nodded. “I guess that’s fair. I mean, you could barely tell me. How are you supposed to tell her?”

Tommy didn’t comment.

~~~~

Things with the Russians and Section D had started bad and ended worse, and that was even before Polly, Arthur, John and Michael went and got fucking arrested.

Tommy’s position in the family was based on him being able to solve any problem that was thrown his way. It had been that way when he was a ten-year-old basically raising Arthur, John and Ada after their mother had killed herself. It had been that way when he was in France keeping Arthur and John from becoming food for the meat grinder better known as the Western Front. It had been that way when they’d gotten back and he’d lead the family on their upwards climb into something that at least superficially resembled respectability. It was expected that he be that way now too, which only served to highlight the depths of his failure.

He’d heard about the warrant out for Pol, Arthur, John and Michael’s arrests from Moss mere hours before the family meeting where everything fell apart. It had quickly become obvious that this was not a spot that could be gotten out of quickly. If Section D had been like Billy Kimber or Sabini, he might have just been able to throw his weight around until they got the picture and backed off. Section D was different. They were enmeshed in the literal, fucking British government. In the eyes of the government Tommy was just a jumped-up tinker who slept on a bed of dirty money. He couldn’t even pretend he had enough weight to get this fixed quickly.

There was also the uncomfortable fact that he was well aware that if Section D had wanted to arrest him too, they could have easily. The fact that they hadn’t felt like a statement. _“We know how to hit you where it hurts you most.”_ Tommy was used to the comfortable safety of people not being able to tell what mattered to him. The idea of Section D—which was basically a faceless organization now that Father Hughes was dead—being able to tell what actually mattered was more terrifying than Tommy would ever admit.

Even worse than Section D’s revenge was the family’s reaction. Tommy couldn’t tell if he was actually surprised that they’d assumed he’d sold them out, or if he’d known that this was what would happen and had just refused to think about it until it happened. Either way it had been soul-shattering, which was another decidedly uncomfortable fact.

After the family was gone and Arrow House echoed with the memory of their rage and betrayal, Tommy stood in the parlor, one hand resting on the back of one of the sofas. He could still feel Linda’s hands beating at him in rage. He’d let her, without even trying to push her off. He didn’t like Linda, but he respected her. She was a lot smarter than people gave her credit for, and Tommy made a habit of respecting intelligent people. There was also the small, horrible part of him he’d been trying to kill since he was at least ten that was thankful someone else was managing Arthur for once, because he’d had enough on these last few months without having to constantly pull Arthur away from whatever cliff he’d found this time.

“Tommy,” Lizzie ventured from behind him. He should have heard her, but he hadn’t. To be honest, he’d forgotten she was still in the house. He’d sent her to take all the money down into the safe so she wouldn’t be around when the police came. He’d assumed she’d fled in the aftermath the way Ada had.

He couldn’t handle her being around. He needed to be alone to lick his wounds. “Go home, Lizzie,” he said. His voice came out as a rasp, so he cleared his throat and tried again, “Go home.”

Lizzie came closer, now that he knew to listen for it he could heard her heals on the rich carpeting. “Tommy,” her face was pinched in concern. “Are you alright?”

Too late Tommy realized that the back of the sofa was probably the only thing keeping him upright, and even then, he was probably seconds from sinking down to the floor. He tried to straighten up with extremely limited success. This was perhaps unsurprising. He didn’t remember the last time he’d slept or eaten, but he was sure both were before Charlie had been kidnapped. A massive migraine was chewing its way through his brain. Going to help with the tunnel had probably been unwise given the last time he’d seen his doctor he’d been instructed to keep taking regular doses of laudanum and avoid any strenuous activity.

“Here,” Lizzie said, reaching for him.

He jerked away from her. “Leave me alone, Lizzie.”

“You’re about to collapse,” Lizzie said, stubborn as always. “Let me help you sit down.”

“Lizzie!” Tommy snarled like a cornered animal, batting her hand away. “Get the fuck out of my fucking house!”

Lizzie took a step back. She looked hurt and Tommy felt somewhat sorry for that, but mostly he just wanted her gone so he could lick his wounds in peace.

“Fine,” Lizzie said after a minute. “If that’s what you want; I’ll leave.” She paused, obviously hoping—expecting?—Tommy to relent. He didn’t. She sighed. “I’ll see you in the office tomorrow.” And she finally left.

Tommy sighed and leaned forward until his forehead rested on the back of the sofa, next to his hand. Now that everyone was gone he needed to get down to business. As always, he’d gotten the family into this mess, and, as always, it was his job to get them out. He held no delusions about the justice or fairness of the government; he knew that if he did nothing Polly, Arthur, John and Michael would hang. That was not acceptable, not just because Tommy’s stupidity had gotten them into this situation, but because the family was his responsibility.

He hadn’t realized he was feeling nauseous until it was already too late. One minute he’d been drowning the knowledge of just how fucked up everything had gotten and the next he was vomiting. It was not pleasant given he hadn’t stomached anything by whiskey in fuck-knew how long. He wasn’t exactly unfamiliar with vomiting up the measly contents of a mostly empty stomach, but that didn’t make the thing any more pleasant. It effort left him gasping for breath and shaking, his mouth tasting rancid.

He legs were really giving out on him now and he was mostly too tired to care. His head was throbbing so hard that he was practically seeing double. He’d just about decided to stop trying to stay upright and simply allow himself to collapse to the floor, when someone else was there, hooking their arms under his and hauling him back into a somewhat upright position. His first thought was that Lizzie hadn’t actually left. He made a frustrated sound in the back of his throat and tried to push her away.

“Mr. Shelby,” a firm but deferential voice said. Not Lizzie. Mary. “You need to rest. Let me help you to bed.”

Embarrassment flooded through him as he realized he’d just thrown up on the carpeting in Arrow House’s parlor. He had no idea how expensive carpeting in a posh house like this one was, but he was sure it was substantial.

Mary got him upstairs in a gesture of truly impressive strength, given he could barely help her. He wasn’t exactly sure why Mary was helping him at all, given they both knew about the awful naked-and-reading-from-Leviticus hallucinations, which sort of made it difficult for Tommy to look directly at her. It occurred to him that he really owed Mary an apology. He had put her through far too much shit over the months since Arrow House had come into his ownership.

Eventually they got to his bedroom. Not the master bedroom. He hadn’t even set foot in the bedroom he and Grace had slept in together since the night she’d died. In fact, he had closed and locked the door that night, but he knew people still went in because someone had to have gotten the dress Grace had been buried in—he still wasn’t clear on who, though he suspected Ada or Lizzie—and he knew Mary unlocked the door for the servants every morning so they could clean it and then locked it up tight again afterwards. They always waited until late morning to do it, so he hadn’t known at first because he’d always been out of the house. The only reason he knew about it now was because he’d heard them doing it all the long months he’d spent recuperating from his head injury.

When Mary dumped him onto the bed he almost immediately toppled over backwards. She tried to convince him to take off his shoes and coat off, but he was already mostly asleep…

He jerked back to full consciousness what felt like seconds later, though he was now shorn of his coat and shoes and tucked into bed so some time must have passed. Panic surged through his veins coating the whole world in an oppressive sense of doom. Charlie. Charlie was in danger. He needed to find Charlie.

He shoved the blankets aside and tried to get up, only for his legs to give out. He collapsed to the floor in a truly impressive flail of limbs, managing to take out the bedside table on his way down. The resulting crash drove spears of pain through his head and brought Mary running.

“Mr. Shelby-” she began, bending down to get her arms under his. “What happened? Let me-”

“Charlie,” he got the word out around the breath-crushing panic in his chest. “Where’s Charlie?”

“Charles is asleep in his room,” Mary said. “Mr. Shelby, you need to help me get you back into bed.”

“I need to find Charlie,” Tommy panted. Mary was able to get him mostly back onto his feet, but it was blatantly obvious that he was going nowhere under his own power. “I have to find Charlie,” he repeated, the words coming out on a breath that was either a gasp or a sob. “The priest has him, and the priest’s a-” the word got caught in his throat. He physically could not make himself say it.

Mary practically dumped him back onto the bed and stood over him as he fought for breath and tried to push himself up. “I’ll fetch Charles,” she said after a minute. “But you must stay put. You’re not well. You must rest.”

Tommy simply gasped up at her for a moment, which she apparently took as agreement because she nodded once and swept out of the room. Perhaps she was just aware that Tommy wasn’t going anywhere whether he wanted to or not. If that was the case, she was unfortunately correct. As much as Tommy wanted to get up and find Charlie himself, he could not rise from the bed again. He could barely lift his head. By the time Mary came back and set a sleepy and confused Charlie on the bed next to him, the panic had begun to fade, leaving only bone-crushing exhaustion in its wake. He ran slightly-numb fingers along Charlie’s cheek to reassure himself that he was actually there and then was suddenly and completely unconscious.

~~~~

The horrible thing about that conversation with Freddie was that it completely changed the way Tommy viewed the world and himself. Before that conversation he’d lived in a happy delusion where he was normal and the way he felt was normal. Afterwards, he was aware of the horrible, soul-shattering truth, which was that he didn’t feel something that everyone else did and that the fact that he didn’t feel that was wrong.

It was quickly obvious that this was something no one could ever know about. The last thing Tommy wanted was for people to decide that he wasn’t actually a real person (and that was basically what this was implying, wasn’t it? If the ability to fall in love was what made you human then logically that meant Tommy wasn’t human, didn’t it?).

Obviously, measures had to be taken to rectify the situation and Tommy Shelby was nothing if not resourceful. One of the advantages to growing up in a situation where you were the one solving all the problems was that you got really good at planning and not letting yourself be overwhelmed. Therefore, Tommy came to the decision that the optimal course of action was just to pretend there was nothing wrong with him, and hope that eventually that pretending would become reality.

So, he pretended. He’d already committed to his supposed crush on Maggie Allen, so he started there. When Freddie and the other boys in his class talked about crushes he talked about Maggie. He learned what he was supposed to say about her and he said those things. The other boys never suspected a thing. Why would they? Everyone had crushes so it would be ridiculous to think someone would fake one.

He ended up dating Maggie a couple years later. By this point Freddie’s feelings had drifted away from Sara and settled on someone else. Tommy had kept up the farce of his crush on Maggie because it was easier than picking someone new. As a result, Freddie was convinced Tommy “had it bad” for Maggie and was honestly more excited than Tommy was when he and Maggie got together.

All in all, it was not a good situation for Tommy. He didn’t like Maggie the way she liked him, and while he did his best to behave the way she expected him to, it felt like he was trying to cram himself into a shape he didn’t fit. It didn’t help that as he’d gotten older it became obvious that not all facets of relationships were a mystery to him. He did understand physical attraction and he understood desire. When the other boys talked about those things he could blend in without having to constantly watch his step. It was just the mushy feelings everyone else had that were missing. He was attracted to Maggie in the physical sense, but his feelings for her emotionally were like that of a friend.

That was not a good realization. Arthur Sr. had run off a few months before Tommy turned fifteen and it was starting to look like he wasn’t going to come back. “Good riddance,” Pol had said with a sniff when Arthur had pointed it out to her. “He can go and carry on with whores somewhere we don’t have to deal with it.” This got Tommy starting to wonder about whether his father loved. When he was in a good mood Arthur Sr. had a habit telling the story of how he’d met and fallen in love with Tommy’s mother in increasingly exaggerated retellings. The fondness with which he’d told those stories had always seemed at odds with the barely concealed distain he’d treated her with in everyday life. Granted, Arthur Sr. treated everyone in his life with barely concealed distain (or open distain in Tommy’s case), so perhaps that didn’t mean anything, but Tommy couldn’t help worrying. Maybe his father was lying just like Tommy was. Maybe this meant that Tommy was just as much of a terrible person as his father was.

That realization did not help him in his relationship with Maggie at all. He started to worry that the way he felt about her was gross and inherently wrong. Maybe he was being just as manipulative and abusive as his father by keeping Maggie in a relationship with someone who couldn’t love her. He did his best to behave the way she expected him to, but it became more and more uncomfortable as the weeks went by until he couldn’t stand it anymore and broke up with her. She cried and was still crying the next day, but all Tommy could feel was relief.

All the more proof he needed that he was actually an inherently awful person.

~~~~

For the next two days Tommy was too sick to move from his bed. He technically slept for most of it, but given how fucked up his relationship with sleep was, that wasn’t saying much. He had a lot of nightmares, often about Grace bleeding out in his arms, often about Charlie stolen by the priest. He woke up in a panic asking for Charlie so many times that Mary brought Charlie’s cradle into his room to make it easier to soothe him.

On the third day, he didn’t exactly feel better, per se, but he was fully coherent and felt decent enough to actually get up and begin attempting to solve the most recent of his myriad problems. Mary was not pleased, but he simply ignored her and made his way to his study.

His study had once been Arrow House’s library. Tommy liked to look at the books and remind himself that they were all his; it was quite impressive given he’d grown up in a house so poor that his grandmother’s battered hand-me-down Bible was the only book they had. He sadly, hadn’t had the time to read any of these books, but he was fairly certain Arrow House’s previous inhabitants hadn’t either, so he didn’t feel quite so bad about it.

Once he was cloistered away in his office with the door closed firmly against Mary’s fretting, he got down to business. In this case, business meant gathering every book on British law in the library and pouring over them systematically in the hopes of finding something that would help him save his family’s lives.

It quickly became obvious that Arrow House’s former owners had seen no use for the intricacies of law and therefore had not owned up-to-date books. Tommy cursed his rotten luck, but skimmed through them anyway, taking note of anything he thought might still be useful in a little notebook he’d bought when he’d returned to Shelby Company Ltd. His memory wasn’t quite what it had been before the brain injury, and while he was holding out hope that would be a temporary thing, he knew better than to count on it.

At some point he ended up passing out in one of the study’s armchairs. He didn’t remember falling asleep. In fact, he didn’t actually remember moving from his desk to the armchair at all, but he knew he must have because Mary wouldn’t have been able to move him without waking him.

All this considered, he was very disoriented when he woke up. The sun was long set so the study was dark, which only made everything more confusing. It was almost twenty minutes before he felt like he had enough of a handle on where he was and how much time had passed that he was able to stumble upstairs and fall back into bed.

Shelby Company Ltd. couldn’t keep running without him indefinitely, especially with the majority of its other board members in prison. Knowing this, he headed into Birmingham the next day, despite Mary’s insistence that he should be resting. He still felt like shit, but he wasn’t about to admit that to anyone, let alone his housekeeper, so he simply ordered her to keep Charlie within her sight the entire time he was gone and left the house.

Lizzie had actually been able to forestall total disaster for the three days he had been gone, which was no mean feat given the circumstances and the fact that she was only a secretary. He wrote a note to remind himself to give her a raise, and got down to business. There was so much to do that he ended up being at the office for a lot longer than he’d planned to be, which was annoying because he still had to drive to London today. He tried to keep the frantic calls back to Arrow House to check on Charlie down to a minimum, but by the time he left the office he nerves were so fried he seriously considered forgetting the second order of business for the day and just going home to check on Charlie.

As much as he wanted to go home, though, he couldn’t. Charlie was as out of danger as he could be given he was the son of the most powerful gangster in Birmingham. Arthur, Polly, John and Michael were not. Every moment Tommy didn’t spend working to secure their release, made it that much more likely they would hang. He couldn’t put this off for another day just because he couldn’t convince himself his son was actually safe.

So, he drove to London and made his way to the library. He figured that the library would have up to date books on British law and he wasn’t wrong. He gathered up as many as he could without getting weird looks from the other patrons and slinked off to a quiet corner to read them and take notes.

It should have been relatively straightforward, and probably would have been, if he hadn’t forgotten Ada worked at the library. Tommy hadn’t heard from his sister since the arrests and he’d assumed that meant she wasn’t talking to him, just like he assumed Esme, Linda and Finn weren’t talking to him. If he’d remembered she worked at the library, he would have had a member or two of the Peaky Blinders figure out what her schedule was and then come when she wasn’t there. As it was, he didn’t remember until it was too late to do anything about it.

“British law,” Ada said, coming up behind him and leaning over his shoulder to read the cover of one of the books. He hadn’t heard her come up. A spasm which would have been a jump in anyone else ran through his body, but he’d long since trained himself not to show his surprise in such an obvious way. “Interesting choice. You’ve been breaking laws longer than I’ve been alive, Tommy, why are you suddenly so interested in the wording?”

He thought about not telling her, but it had been a long day, he was tired and he had a migraine coming on with a vengeance. He really did not want to fight with his baby sister right now, and refusing to give her information would likely only make her angrier than she already was. “I don’t know anything about the laws governing arrests and appeals,” he said. “I need to know all the loopholes I or anyone else might exploit before I make any plans.”

Honestly, he expected Ada to start shouting, never mind the fact they were in a library, but she didn’t. Instead she just sighed in the way that he imagined she did when Karl did something touching but very sad. “Oh, Tom…” He could not deal with the look on her face—one that suggested that maybe she wasn’t mad and that maybe she knew he hadn’t wanted this and that maybe she still loved him—so he turned his attention back to the books.

He hoped Ada might just get bored and go away so he could get back to his work, but she pulled out a chair, sat down and pulled a book towards herself. She flipped through it until she evidently found something important. “Are you taking notes anywhere?” she asked. “Or am I just supposed to accept that you can hold all this in your head?”

He would rather die than admit he’d been having memory problems so he simply handed her the notebook and pen. She wrote whatever she had found down and then went back to reading.

They worked like this for a while in a silence that was only a little tense. Tommy was just getting to the point where he was willing to admit the pain in his head was too bad to keep reading, when Ada broke the silence. “Lizzie said you took a couple days off.”

Tommy grunted. He wondered how much Mary had told Lizzie and how much Lizzie had told Ada, but he knew better than to ask.

“You look like you’ve been sick,” Ada said. “Actually, you sort of look like you are sick now. Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” he said because he’d probably spontaneously combust if he said anything else.

“You’re sure?” Ada asked. “If you need to take some more time off, you can. I can try to help Lizzie with things.”

“Ada-” he began.

“You almost died of a traumatic brain injury three months ago,” Ada said. “The doctors said the recovery time would be a year at the least. I’d be shocked if you weren’t struggling right now. Are you taking any pain medication? You look like you have a headache. Plus, didn’t you say you need glasses?”

“Ada,” he repeated. He was trying to sound firm, but the words came out a little brittle. “I said I was fine.”

She heaved a sigh. “Fine, if that’s the way you want to be. At least call it a night, though. It’s at least nine, and you still have to drive back to wherever you’re staying.”

“Fine,” he said. He didn’t like giving in, but he couldn’t exactly see straight anymore, so it wasn’t like he was going to be able to get much more research done in this state anyway.

“Good,” Ada said. “We’ll meet up tomorrow for breakfast, or lunch, whichever you feeling up to, and then we’ll run some errands.”

Privately, Tommy didn’t think he’d feel up for either meal. His already spotty appetite had curled up and died with Grace, and Charlie getting kidnapped hadn’t helped any. Still, he knew better than to worry Ada, given all that would do would make her watch him like a hawk whenever there was food around, which he definitely didn’t want. “What kind of errands?” he asked instead.

The look she gave him said the answer to should have been obvious. “Tommy, we’re going to get you a pair of glasses.”


	2. Part Two

After breaking up with Maggie, Tommy didn’t date again. He gave up on the pretense of pretending to have crushes as well. He was done acting. The last thing he wanted to do was manipulate anyone else into falling in love with him when he was a monster who couldn’t love them back. He would do much less damage if he didn’t let anyone get their hopes up.

Then when he was seventeen he fell in love with Freddie.

Of course, it was a crush first, but it took him so long to realize what it was that he completely missed that stage. He and Freddie had always been close. No one in the whole world knew Tommy as well as Freddie knew him. Tommy had always loved Freddie fiercely, but the switch from platonic to romantic feelings came as a total shock. He wasn’t sure whether he should dance for joy that he could love after all, or sink into a pool of sadness because obviously Freddie would never like him back. He didn’t even know if Freddie liked men, let alone if he’d be willing to date his best friend.

The sad thing about realizing he was in love with Freddie was that it made things very awkward very quickly. Freddie was acting strangely too and Tommy started to worry that Freddie knew. It was enough to almost make him wish he could go back to thinking he couldn’t love.

Oddly enough, the thing that broke his and Freddie’s stalemate was Arthur. Arthur was completely infatuated with some whore he’d been seeing and none of Tommy’s logic could convince him that there was no way the woman liked him back—actually, Tommy was fairly certain the woman never wanted to see Arthur again, which made him feel kind of bad for her: Arthur was annoying when he was in love.

One day after yet another unsuccessful discussion about the topic with Arthur, Tommy and Freddie had gone to sit by the canal while Tommy cooled off. Tommy had been pacing and ranting, when Freddie cut him off, “I agree that Arthur is being irrational, but you have to at least try to understand his point of view. Haven’t you ever been in love with someone who didn’t love you back?”

“Yes,” Tommy said without thinking, then turned away cursing under his breath. Normally he was better at keeping his secrets than this.

He half expected Freddie to comment about how Tommy didn’t fall in love, but he didn’t. Sometimes Tommy forgot that he’d such a good job pretending to have crushes in his early teens that people didn’t realize it had been an act. “I do too,” Freddie said and they lapsed back into tense silence.

Tommy gritted his teeth and paced a little more. He hated the tension that had been between them these last few weeks and he wanted it to stop. He wanted Freddie to know, not because he thought it would do anything but because perhaps it would help to clear the air. “For the record,” he said staring out across the canal so he wouldn’t have to look at Freddie when he said it. “I’m in love with you.”

There were a few minutes of tense silence, then Tommy heard Freddie get up. He held himself as still as possible as he listened to Freddie come over to stand next to him. He didn’t look in the other boy’s direction.

“Tom…” Freddie ventured. Tommy still didn’t look at him. “Tommy,” then he took Tommy’s chin, turned his head gently and kissed him.

“I’m in love with you too,” he said when they pulled apart. “Why didn’t you say something sooner?”

“I didn’t know you liked men!” Tommy protested. “Why didn’t _you_ say something?”

“I didn’t know _you_ liked men,” Freddie said, then he rested his forehead on Tommy’s shoulder and burst into laughter. “We’re both idiots.”

And just like that Tommy had a boyfriend. Of course, this wasn’t the sort of relationship you could tell anyone about, so it was he and Freddie’s giddy secret. They spent the summer wrapped up in the newness of it all. Tommy had always heard that romantic relationships were supposed to be a higher form of relationship, infinitely more powerful than any friendship, but he didn’t necessarily find that to be the case. He didn’t think he loved Freddie any more now than he had when they’d “just” been friends, it was just different now.

Things carried on this way until after Tommy’s eighteenth birthday. Then Polly hung out a set of stolen sheets to dry, and one of the neighbors saw the monogram on them and reported the family to the police. The police’s retribution was swift and terrible. They knocked down the door to the Watery Lane house one sunny morning and informed Polly that she had been judged an unfit mother and that her children, little Michael and little Anna, were now wards of the state. None of Polly’s begging would change anything, they bundled Michael and Anna into a car and drove away. The family was probably lucky John and Ada had already left for school, or the same might have happened to them.

Tommy had spent the night at Freddie’s, so by the time he got home it was all over and Polly was sitting in a heap on the kitchen floor howling with grief. Tommy went straight to the police station with Freddie at his side, but there was nothing that he could do to convince the bastards that Michael and Anna would not be better off away from their family. (Years later, when he was doing research to try to find Michael for Polly, he would learn that Michael and Anna had been shipped to the orphanage Father Hughes worked at within hours. They weren’t even in Birmingham for him to get back.)

Life at Watery Lane went downhill fast after that. Polly spent most her time lying in bed staring at the walls. Tommy couldn’t get her to look at him half the time, let alone speak to him. The few times she actually did get out of bed she drank so much Tommy was afraid she was going to hurt herself or someone else.

Then as if things were going badly enough, Arthur Sr. slunk back into their lives like a plague. They hadn’t heard anything from him since he’d run off seemingly for good three years before, but to Tommy it was unsurprising that the man would choose the absolute worst possible time to make his return. What surprised him was that Arthur Sr. returned with a baby in tow.

Arthur Sr. refused to answer questions about what had happened to Finn’s mother, but it was quickly obvious that whoever she was she was either dead or in no position to care for a baby. Tommy’s hatred for his father was growing by the day, but he was hardwired to keep the rest of his family safe, so Finn became his responsibility without him really having to think about it, never mind that he had enough on between caring for Polly and trying to fill the void that was left in the Peaky Blinders without her leadership.

Before he’d vanished when Tommy had been fifteen, Arthur Sr. had a habit of going away suddenly and then returning either completely broke and needing the Peaky Blinders’ coffers to bail him out or with some kind of bat-crazy scheme which he also needed the Peaky Blinders’ coffers for. That had not changed. Turned out he had a fucking London gang after him this time. The gang wasn’t very big or powerful, and in later years Tommy would think that he could have gotten away without paying a cent if he’d just thrown his weight around. However, Tommy was newly eighteen and had never managed the Peaky Blinders on his own before. The fact that the gang was from London intimidated him, so when they sent an agent demanding payment, he paid without a question. The sum put a sizable dent in their savings and then Arthur Sr. made off with the rest of the money when he vanished again leaving Finn behind.

The Shelbys hadn’t necessarily been doing badly financially before Arthur Sr. had made his far from triumphant return. Once he left, the family was plunged back into a level of poverty they hadn’t been in since right after Grandad Shelby had killed himself. Polly was still a shadow of herself who was incapable of helping Tommy figure out what to do. Finn was just a baby, John and Ada were just kids, and Arthur still looked to Tommy to avoid having to make the hard choices himself. Tommy had been parenting siblings for most of his life, but this was the first time the livelihood of the whole family and Grandad’s precious Peaky Blinders had landed squarely on his shoulders.

It was a hard winter. He made decisions, half of which were wrong and only made things worse. He tried to learn from those mistakes and do better the next time, but the learning curve was steep. Sometime in February when he hadn’t eaten in four days because there wasn’t enough food to go around, he started seriously contemplating getting a job at the BSA factory. Grandad would roll over in his grave because he’d always been proud of the fact that no Shelby had ever made money doing something legal, but at least maybe he’d be able to buy food.

He didn’t end up going to work in the factory. He expanded the Peaky Blinders into the protection and smuggling businesses instead, and picked up the slack with outright theft of anything the family needed from money to food to clothes. Eventually spring came, race season began again, Polly slowly began to come back to them, and things started to get better.

Given everything that was going on, it was perhaps unsurprising that he and Freddie drifted apart. In fact, Tommy was so focused on saving the family that sometime in the middle of April, he finally realized he hadn’t seen Freddie in months. He went to see Freddie again, afraid that the other boy would be angry but Freddie just hugged him and asked him if he was alright.

That wasn’t to say that things were exactly as they had been. Sometime over that horrible winter, their romantic feelings for each other had cooled and their old friendship reasserted itself. Tommy couldn’t say that he was disappointed by that even though that meant he was now back to feeling no romantic feelings for anyone. He loved Freddie and he was glad to have him close regardless of what type of relationship they had.

“You know,” Freddie told him a few weeks after they’d reconnected. “I found something new recently. I think you’ll be interested in it too.”

“Alright,” Tommy said, trying to figure out why Freddie was being so cagey. Surely, he knew that he could tell Tommy anything without judgement? “What is it?”

Freddie just looked at him for a moment then took a deep breath and said, “Do you want to come to a communist rally with me?”

~~~~

While he was going to London fairly frequently as he gathered the information necessary to get the family out of prison, it took Tommy over a month to be able to stomach the idea of being in the same room as Alfie Solomons again.

That was a risky move. The distillery and Shelby Company Ltd. were two completely different organizations which only worked together because the people at the reins were of the agreement that their arrangement was mutually beneficial. Tommy had not bothered contacting Alfie after he betrayed them to Section D so Alfie had no way of knowing if they were still business partners or if Tommy had cut all ties. To be fair, Tommy hadn’t been sure if he’d cut all ties for the first couple weeks, either, but after a while he calmed down enough to admit to himself that the rum smuggling business was too large a portion of the company income to let slide. That meant he had to make up with Alfie.

Therefore, one sunny morning just over a month after Tommy had held a gun in Alfie’s face and screamed that Section D had Charlie, he found himself being ushered into the distillery just like every other meeting he and Alfie had ever had. The ordinariness of the whole thing was a bit unnerving. In fact, Tommy might have started to wonder if Alfie had forgotten about what had happened entirely if Ollie wasn’t so obviously on edge.

Tommy had expected being in the same room as Alfie again to be difficult, but it actually wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. Over the last month, he’d had a lot of time to think about what had happened, and he’d come to a number of conclusions. The largest was that Alfie was as good a man as possible given his occupation. Probably a better man than Tommy was, actually. Alfie would not have double-crossed Tommy if he’d known that Charlie would be kidnapped as a result, which put the blame for the whole thing even more firmly on Tommy’s shoulders because he’d been the one who hadn’t told anyone that Section D was threatening Charlie.

Even though Tommy didn’t blame Alfie for what had happened to Charlie anymore, things were still tense. The handshake they shared at the beginning of the meeting felt a little like they each were trying to break the other’s hand. They barely made eye contact and the conversation remained resolutely focused on business. Alfie didn’t even go off on any rambling tangents or comment on Tommy’s new glasses, which was really too bad because Tommy could have used some of Alfie’s ridiculous levity.

By the time they finished reworking their treaties and reaffirming their status as business partners, the tension was starting to get to Tommy, and he was more than ready to get this meeting over and go back to saving his family. He made his excuses and started towards the door.

“Your son alright, mate?” Alfie called after him, causing Tommy to pause with his hand on the doorknob. Somehow the atmosphere got even tenser. This was the first time either of them had even passingly acknowledged what had happened between them.

“He’s fine,” Tommy said and tried to will himself to believe it. Charlie did seem to be alright, and he was so young that he’d probably forget the whole incident given time. Tommy was pretty sure he’d be having nightmares about it for the rest of his fucking life, but that was not what Alfie had asked.

Alfie nodded slowly, looking like he still wasn’t sure if he’d made a grave error by asking. He opened his mouth and Tommy watched him decide not to ask about the rest of the family. As far as Tommy knew, every gangster and Romani family between here and Wales knew about the arrests and most of them probably believed Tommy had sold his own family out. He was glad Alfie decided not to bring it up. He did not want to talk about that with Alfie Solomons, especially not so soon after Alfie’s betrayal.

“Good day, Mr. Solomons,” he said and turned the doorknob.

“Oi, Tommy,” Alfie called after him, Tommy looked back again. “I hear you’ve been spending a lot of time in London these days. I have a fighter who has matches on Thursday nights. You should come to one. Take a little time off. I’ll introduce you to how I profit off the sport. I think your bookmaker roots will appreciate it.”

If Tommy hadn’t known better he would have thought Alfie had just asked him out, which was ridiculous given everything that had happened between them of late. Still, it wasn’t like Tommy had anything else to do with his time besides driving himself mad contemplating how outmatched he was and how likely it was that this situation was just going to continue spiraling into disaster. Besides, it would be interesting to see how fixing fistfights differed from fixing horse races. “I would be interested in that,” he said. “Call me with the time and place.”

~~~~

And so, Tommy Shelby became a communist. He hadn’t necessarily intended for that to happen when he went to his first communist rally with Freddie, but somehow it happened anyway. He didn’t mention it to the family, though he didn’t think that they would react as badly as Freddie’s family no doubt would. It wasn’t like capitalism had ever done anything to useful for the Shelby family.

He and Freddie attended the rallies for years. Neither of them ever took a leadership role, because neither was ready to be outed as communist, but they were still active members and met many new people. Two of these new people were the Jurossi sisters.

Greta and Kitty Jurossi began attending rallies a few years before the war began, back when no one really believed the war was actually going to happen. Greta was pretty and serious and the sort of smart that was wasted in Birmingham. She also thought that romantic and sexual feelings were much rarer than people said they were, and even once Freddie—who was ridiculously insulted by her opinion for whatever reason—set her straight, she simply switched to maintaining that she had never desired a person she hadn’t already formed a bond with.

Knowing this actually made her easier to be around. Tommy did find Greta attractive in the physical sense, but emotionally his feelings stayed stubbornly platonic. He’d stuck to whores since breaking up with Freddie to avoid the uncomfortable awkwardness of whatever person he was dating falling in love with him when he was incapable of reciprocating. It was nice to know he could interact with Greta without having to worry she was falling in love with him.

Then he and Greta caught feelings for each other. If Tommy actually thought about it, the unlikeliness of the whole thing was hilarious, though he couldn’t help but be thankful. Being in love with Greta was vastly different from being in love with Freddie, but they were totally different people so perhaps that made sense. He wasn’t sure either was necessarily better.

Greta’s parents weren’t as happy about the arrangement as Tommy and Greta were. The Jurossi family was not part of Vincente Changretta’s gang, but they had ties to it just like everyone in Small Heath had ties to the Peaky Blinders. The fact that Greta was stepping out with a Shelby made things a bit awkward with inter-gang relations, but neither Tommy nor Greta cared.

Tommy and Greta talked about everything from politics to dreams to silly childhood memories. Greta became the first and last person Tommy ever told that he had basically raised his siblings because none of the adults in his life had been willing or capable of doing it. Greta was the only person he ever told that he sometimes hated Arthur and Polly for not helping him.

There was a lot of radical honesty going around in his and Greta’s relationship, but the one thing Tommy never told her was the truth about how he loved. On some level he was aware that was ridiculous. There were a lot of similarities between how he and Greta loved, despite the fact that she didn’t generally experience physical attraction without a bond either, but for some reason the idea of telling her the truth filled him with panic. Perhaps it was just because he had never told anyone about it, but he didn’t think that was the whole case. Thing was, Greta had the luxury of a fairly good childhood. The Jurossis were not rich, but they ran a bakery and had always had enough money to put food on the table. Greta had never gone days without food because her younger siblings needed food more than she did. She had never stood by the canal and watched men fish her mother’s drowned body out of the water. She had never walked into the family betting shop one morning to discover that her grandfather had shot himself during the night. She had never been beaten by her father until she couldn’t walk. Greta had a good life. There were no skeletons lurking in her closet waiting to poke their heads out and prove how broken she was. The way she loved could only be something intrinsic, while Tommy did not have that luxury. As much as he tried to pretend otherwise, chances were he felt the way he did because there was something very wrong with him.

Still that secret did not stop him from loving Greta as fiercely as he could. Eventually, he managed to secure her father’s permission and asked her to marry him. She said yes. Everything looked like it was finally going right.

Then less than a month later, Greta got sick.

Consumption, the doctors said. They said that the prognosis was bleak. Tommy refused to believe it. He sat by Greta’s bedside for months, caring for her, reassuring and begging a God that had always seemed to be against him for her life. It was pointless. She died in the middle of the night. There was nothing peaceful about it, though Greta’s parents would later try to reframe the narrative into some kind of religious experience to make it easier to bear.

By Greta’s funeral, Tommy hadn’t slept in days and was so drunk he could barely stand. Afterwards, he’d gone to the Garrison and kept drinking, mostly unaware of the worried presences of Arthur and John who Polly had no doubt been told to keep an eye on him. He’d passed out at some point during the night and in the morning, he had gone and made the worst decision of his life: he’d enlisted in the army. To make matters worse, he’d still been half drunk and therefore hadn’t tried to keep Arthur and John from enlisting with him, therefore multiplying his worst decision by three. However, at the time he hadn’t known that. At the time the thought of remaining in the city where Greta had lived and died was sickening. He could not bear it. He needed to go somewhere, and France was as good a place as ever.

Besides, it was August 1914, and the papers said the war would be over by Christmas.

~~~~

Somehow, he and Alfie went from that tense meeting to fucking. Tommy was a bit confused as to how that had happened. It wasn’t like he hadn’t suspected Alfie was asking him out when he’d suggested they go to the fights. It also wasn’t like Tommy hadn’t known that Alfie fancied men in general and Tommy in specific—he wasn’t stupid and he’d gotten very good at telling when other people were attracted to him over the years. No, what surprised him was that he’d agreed to it. Alfie had betrayed him a mere month before; what the hell was Tommy thinking, sleeping with the man?

Vaguely, he was aware that between May, Tatiana, Alfie and, if he was honest with himself, Grace, he was cultivating quite the reputation for sleeping with his business associates. That was bad. Shouldn’t he have already learned that nothing good could come of the people you did business with seeing you like that? He really needed to exert some effort in finding more suitable lovers. However, even knowing that didn’t exactly help him to go out looking for those more suitable lovers, somehow, he still ended up with Alfie.

Alfie had a nice bed. That was what Tommy kept thinking about in the aftermath of their first time. It wasn’t as nice a bed as the ones in Arrow House, but as far as beds went it was a nice bed, definitely much nicer than the one in Tommy’s old room at Watery Lane. It had soft sheets and a lot of warm blankets. Even Tommy had to admit it was the ideal place for a nap, something that he was seriously considering if he was being completely honest with himself.

Alfie shifted. He was lying with his arm draped over Tommy’s waist. This wasn’t something Tommy usually would allow, let alone admit to kind of liking, but people didn’t touch him anywhere near enough, especially now that the family wasn’t talking to him.

“You alright?” Alfie ventured.

“Yes,” Tommy mumbled, his face half pressed into the sheets.

“You’re being very quiet,” Alfie commented. “Not that you’re not usually fucking silent, but you’re also mellow and I wouldn’t ever use that word to describe you.”

So much for a nap. Tommy might be stupid enough to sleep with his business partners, but showing them vulnerability was still a bad idea. He pushed himself up into a sitting position and reached for his cigarette case, ignoring the disappointment he felt at breaking the physical contact.

Alfie watched him, with his head cocked slightly to the side. “Was that the first time you’d done something like this?” he asked.

Tommy lit his cigarette and took a drag before he responded. “No.”

“In France?” Alfie guessed.

Tommy nodded. He didn’t elaborate; Alfie would understand not wanting to talk about anything remotely related to France.

“Well,” Alfie rolled onto his back, but didn’t make any move to get up. “I’m sure this was better than anything you could have gotten over there.”

Tommy snorted and only barely refrained from pointing out that wouldn’t be hard given France had been hell on earth. He could tell by the look on Alfie’s face, that the other man was thinking the same thing.

They lapsed back into silence. Tommy finished his first cigarette and lit another. His head was feeling very heavy so he eased himself back down onto the bed and stared up at the ceiling while he smoked.

“If you fall asleep and burn holes in my sheets and mattress with that thing I’ll bill you for the replacements, mate,” Alfie threatened, though his tone of voice was lighthearted.

“I could afford that, you know,” Tommy said with a smile. The euphoria of realizing that he actually had excess income never got old.

Alfie snorted, but didn’t comment, instead he launched into a ramble about something Tommy didn’t quite feel like exerting the energy to keep track of. Instead he just lay on the bed, smoking lazily, and let Alfie’s voice lull him to sleep.

He did end up falling asleep with a lit cigarette still between his fingers, and he did burn a hole in Alfie’s mattress. Alfie didn’t bill him for the replacement. In fact, Tommy was fairly certain he didn’t replace the mattress at all.

~~~~

The war changed everything. The Shelby brothers that left Small Heath in 1914 were not the same Shelby brothers who returned in 1918. The same could be said for every other man who went away and came back, to say nothing of the ones who went away and did not come back at all. The war fundamentally changed everyone involved in it, and there was no way of going back to the way things had been before.

Of all the myriad fundamentally changed men in Small Heath, Tommy was one of the most changed. If asked people would point to Danny Owens—whose violent loses of grip on reality had most of Small Heath calling him “Danny Whizz-Bang” within weeks—or they would point to Willie Green—a man who had been previously been frustratingly optimistic, who had come home from war only to shoot himself within days, something so out of character his senile mother refused to believe it. No one would ever name Tommy as majorly changed in the face of stories like that, but he was changed all the same and everyone knew it. The Tommy Shelby who had gone to France had been an idealist, had loved horses, had believed things would get better if you just stuck it out long enough. The Tommy Shelby who came back had lost his faith in God and man and everything in between. He’d never put much stock in religion, but now he was convinced enough of its falseness to be openly atheist, much to Polly’s horror. Communism seemed stupid now too. The wealthy elite had been able to buy themselves and their sons out of war; a bunch of poor people shouting about how the system was unfair wasn’t going to stop them. The only thing it could possibly do was bring the same guns he had faced in France down on Small Heath, and he would not help make that happen.

It turned out once you’d given up belief in all the systems humans invested their hope for the future in, it was easy to see a path forward. The Tommy Shelby who came back from France looked at the family, the cramped, drafty, old house on Watery Lane and Small Heath as a whole and decided they deserved better than this. More specifically he decided that not only was he the only person who could make things better for them, but that he didn’t care what he had to do to get to that goal. After all, for all intents and purposes Tommy Shelby was already dead, what did it matter what happened to him now?

That was different than saying everything was working smoothly. Freddie did not take Tommy’s fall from communism well, and he took Tommy plans for the family—which even he had to admit were the most traditionally capitalist direction any Shelby had ever taken—even worse. Tommy and Freddie had been two halves of the same whole for the vast majority of their lives, and Tommy found that even in his newly changed state he was not prepared to be faced by the full force of Freddie’s hatred; it was far easier to just pretend Freddie didn’t exist.

In the face of all his new plans, many things fell to the wayside, and worrying about romance was one of them. When he wanted sex he went to Lizzie Stark, who was a childhood friend who become a prostitute after getting laid off from the factory several years before. He trusted Lizzie, and knew she wouldn’t tell tales, even if his relentless focus on his goals and the opium he’d started smoking to fill in the gaps weren’t always enough to hold the mask he was using to hide the shards of his mental health in place. He hadn’t exactly intended for the thing to be a secret, but neither he nor Lizzie mentioned the arrangement to anyone and somehow no one found out. He knew that rumors about how Tommy Shelby hadn’t been interested in women since the war were flying around Small Heath, but he really had far too many other problems to worry about correcting the rumors.

And then Grace came.

She was beautiful, which was one of the things which first caught his attention. The other was that she wasn’t who she said she was. Most of the people he knew didn’t notice, but if Tommy had learned one thing since coming back from France, it was that most of the people he knew were idiots. Arthur, for example, probably wouldn’t realize women like Grace didn’t end up as barmaids for no reason if someone had written it on a sign and held it up in front of him. Tommy was different. He knew there was something going on, the trick would be finding out what.

Looking back on the whole affair after Grace had betrayed them, it was obvious that he hadn’t been quite as objective in his efforts to figure out what her secret was as he’d thought he’d been. He’d been absolutely convinced she’d ended up in Small Heath after being disowned by her family for having a child out of wedlock. He could now see that he’d actually been projecting his fears for Ada’s future onto Grace. Grace had always given off the air of a woman on a mission. Only a fool would think she’d ended up in Small Heath because she had nowhere else to go, which apparently meant that Tommy was as much a fool as everyone else.

The other thing which was painfully obvious looking back was the way that his feelings for her changed over the months she’d worked at the Garrison. He’d grown to like her company as time went on, to appreciate her wit and the spine of steel she hid under the guise of a well-brought up posh girl. In many ways, interacting with her was easier than interacting with anyone else he knew. Everyone he’d known before the war had a disturbing tendency of looking at him back they thought he was some kind of demon who had murdered Tommy Shelby and taken over his body. Grace wasn’t like that. She hadn’t known him before the war so she had nothing to compare him too. It was refreshing to spend time with someone who you knew wasn’t constantly wondering why you just couldn’t go back to the way you’d been before.

That was different, however, then saying that he’d realized exactly how his feelings for Grace were changing until they already had. He hadn’t noticed the moment when the crush formed with Freddie or Greta either, so perhaps it made sense that he hadn’t realized he was in love with Grace until the moment Polly pointed out that love was the only thing that could blind a man like him.

Of course, that did him little good all things considered, but then given his track record with romance, perhaps that was unsurprising. Sitting in the office of the betting shop, wound from Billy Kimber bandaged and a typewriter sitting before him, he spent a moment trying to figure out how this turn of events was even fucking possible. He’d known Freddie for years before falling in love with him. He’d known Greta for considerably less time, but still she hadn’t been lying to him the whole time.

Still, he wasn’t clear on exactly how much Grace had been lying about. Obviously, she’d been lying about what she was doing in Small Heath, but how much else had been a lie? He wasn’t convinced as much of her behavior during the months they’d known her was a lie as Polly was. He was inclined to think that she had been largely genuine, which was probably a simpler cover to hold up than trying to be someone else entirely, especially since it wasn’t like anyone would think to suspect her of being an agent of the Crown.

She’d told him that she loved him, when he’d gone to her apartment just a few hours before, and he believed she was telling the truth. That wasn’t the question. The question was what to do about the other thing she’d said, her offer about coming to London and going away with her.

It was an interesting clash of desires. On one hand he really did want to meet her in London, and on the other were his plans and the family. Could he actually do as she’d suggested? Could he actually hand his share of the newly minted Shelby Company Ltd. to Finn and go away with her? Could he actually walk away from the responsibility for the family? That responsibility had been with him as long as he could remember, only growing heavier and heavier as the years had passed. Did he actually know who Tommy Shelby was if he wasn’t making sure Finn had enough to eat, John didn’t drink too much, Ada stayed out of trouble, Arthur and Pol weren’t about to hurtle off a metaphorical cliff, all while keeping the business running and a roof over all their heads? Did he actually want to find out?

He wasn’t sure. People were supposed to define their lives based on romantic love, but Tommy had never experienced that type of love reliably enough to do that. Instead he’d defined his life by the family and he didn’t regret that. He didn’t want to walk out on them, but at the same time he wanted to go with Grace, to try something new, to see what happened. He knew that if he let Grace walk away now, chances were he’d never get another opportunity with her. Hell, he might never even see her again. It would be foolish to throw away romantic love—something he’d been told to aspire to all his life—for a family which would never stop needing him, but he wasn’t sure that was what he wanted. He wasn’t sure what he wanted at all.

When Tommy had been a little boy, back before things had gotten really bad, back when Mum had still been mostly able to take care of them all, Polly had learned to flip a coin. Pol was only six years older than he was so their relationship had always skirted the line where they were more siblings than anything else, especially in those early years before Polly had become Grandad’s de facto second-in-command and Tommy had become his siblings’ de facto parent. In the way of young children, Polly’s immediate response to learning how to flip a coin, was to show off to Tommy and Arthur. For a few weeks coin tosses had been the only way decisions had been made around the Watery Lane house, but then Polly and Arthur had gotten sick of it and moved on to better and brighter things. Tommy had never quite done the same. Of course, he’d stopped deciding what to wear based on the flip of a coin, but whenever there was important decision that he couldn’t make up his mind about, he flipped a coin. This carried on into adulthood, a last resort for when all the logic in the world couldn’t be used to divine the right choice.

This was one of those moments. He needed to decide, and he was incapable of doing it. A lifetime of habit had him fishing a coin out of his pocket and tossing it into the air, fed up with the confusion. He was done going around and around in circles about this.

Still, he sat with the coin covered by his hand for a while after the toss, working up the courage to check which way it had fallen. He felt like he should be hoping for one response over the other, but he couldn’t decide which was the response he wanted. Eventually, he kicked himself for being ridiculous and uncovered the coin. It said he was staying with the family.

He couldn’t tell if he was relieved, disappointed, or both.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Before you ask, yes I did just write Greta demiromantic demisexual.


	3. Part Three

Ada had finally taken Karl and gone to America to begin her new position there for Shelby Company Ltd. Tommy hadn’t seen another member of the family since she’d gone. Linda and Esme both hated his guts, so he wasn’t going to try to see them. He couldn’t handle the look on Uncle Charlie’s face whenever he came to the Yard—like he was trying to figure out what had gone wrong to make Tommy into such a monster—so he was avoiding him too. Finn was living alone in the Watery Lane house, which felt like a horrible thing to allow given Finn was only sixteen, but Tommy couldn’t look his baby brother in the face whenever they ran across each other so there was nothing he could do. He spent most of his time at the office, Arrow House or in London and let Lizzie run the betting shop and anything that required going back into Small Heath.

Tommy had never really been separated from the family like this before. For as long as he could remember, the family had been the center of his world. Even when Mum had still been alive, her ability to care for them hadn’t necessarily been reliable. Tommy had learned early on that he was the only one who could be relied on to make sure his siblings were alright, and then after Michael and Anna had been taken he’d learned that the same held true for the Peaky Blinders as well. Even in France he had still had Arthur and John to look after. From an early age he’d learned that if he was hungry, John was hungrier. If he was thirsty, Finn was thirstier. If he was cold, Ada was colder. If he was sad, Arthur was even more sad. Over the years he’d gotten so used to it that he didn’t even notice how much time he spent making sure his siblings and Polly were safe and healthy until they were all taken away from him.

The scariest thing about the whole situation was how lost this made him feel. He’d never been removed from his role of responsibility over the family, and he became increasingly terrified that he didn’t know who he was without it. Who was Tommy Shelby if he wasn’t caretaking a list of siblings no one else had ever cared about? Was he anyone without that?

As a result, he threw himself wholeheartedly into the business and his efforts to circumvent the British justice system and get the family free. He had to believe that everything would go back to normal when the family was free, though deep down inside he knew that was unlikely. He had to believe it though, he wasn’t sure how he’d keep going otherwise.

Though he would never admit it, Tommy was desperately lonely. His relationship with Lizzie had always been floating somewhere along the line of not being business partners but also not quite being friends, but she knew him well enough to make things awkward. At this point, the monthly outings to the fights with Alfie and then night of fucking afterwards were the only meaningful interactions he had. He was trying to keep Alfie from noticing that, because it would just be embarrassing, especially if Alfie made the mistake of assuming Tommy was in love with him, which he wasn’t.

That was another problem which Tommy was doing his utmost to ignore. He’d only had romantic feelings for three people in his whole life. Freddie, Greta and Grace were nothing alike so it was hard to figure out why he had fallen for all of them. In the end, knowing Greta was what had led him to theorize that it was something to do with connections. He had been friends with Freddie for years before falling in love with him. He’d known Greta for a long time too, and had formed a strong bond with her before he’d developed a crush on her. He and Grace hadn’t known each other as well, but there had still been a feeling that they understood each other that didn’t happen very often, let alone with people he’d known for as little time as he’d known her.

If his theory was right and he really did only develop romantic feelings for people he’d formed strong connections with, didn’t that mean he should be developing them for Alfie? He and Alfie had been sort-of friends for years, and Tommy liked to think they understood each other. He liked Alfie. He considered him his friend. Shouldn’t that be enough?

He found himself spending a lot of time analyzing his feelings for Alfie. If he was going to fall for Alfie at what point would the shift happen? He’d never caught it in the moment. With Freddie, Greta and Grace he’d always had the uncomfortable moment when he realized that he feelings had changed a long time before, but that he hadn’t noticed. Therefore, he had nothing to compare his feelings for Alfie too.

To make things even worse, it was fairly obvious that Alfie liked him a lot. Tommy couldn’t tell if he was overthinking it, but there was every possibility that Alfie was falling in love with him, not knowing that Tommy couldn’t love him back. Maybe he should just call it off, before things spiraled out of control. After all, he wasn’t so much of a monster that he’d let Alfie fall in love with someone who could not love him back, right?

So, he started trying to distance himself from Alfie. He didn’t actually want to do it. He liked spending time with Alfie, and it was a welcome distraction from the way his life had spiraled into chaos with an empty hole where the family was supposed to be. He didn’t feel quite so alone when he was with Alfie, and it took every bit of self-control he had to keep from chasing that.

Even though he knew breaking things off with Alfie was the sensible and moral thing to do, knowing he had done the right thing did not make the loneliness easier to bear. It also didn’t fill the late hours of the night when there was nothing to keep his grief at bay.

If he was being honest with himself, the full force of his grief for Grace scared him. He’d lost people he’d been in love with before, but this was different. He’d known Greta and Freddie were going, and he’d had a chance to brace himself before the end. Grace had been different. One instant she’d been alive and healthy and the whole world was stretched out before them, and the next she’d been bleeding out in his arms and everything had been over. He kept waking up at night convinced she was lying next to him only to have to realize she was dead all over again. To counteract this, he took to sleeping in the rocking chair in Charlie’s room, which was also helpful because when he wasn’t waking up thinking Grace was still alive he was waking up in a panic convinced Father Hughes still had Charlie.

His relationship or whatever it had been with Alfie had helped with all of this. In its absence he found himself retreating to the prostitutes at the Midland. Sex he paid for was a pretty poor way of dealing with his own loneliness, but it was the least damaging way. Okay, maybe not the least damaging way, but Lizzie had gotten to know him too well over the years and he couldn’t stand the way she sometimes looked at him like she’d taken him apart and figured out how he ticked. There were many things Tommy didn’t deal with well, and vulnerability was one of them, especially now.

There was another plus to only sleeping with whores, and that was that there was no chance of an emotional bond forming. Granted, Arthur did have a track record of falling in love with prostitutes, but in general that didn’t happen. Therefore, Tommy didn’t have to worry about whether or not he should be developing feelings or not. It was much easier and much less stressful. This was important, because if Tommy was completely honest, the real reason he’d stopped sleeping with Alfie had nothing to do with morality. If he was completely honest—and he wasn’t in the mood to be—he was actually afraid of what the fact that he didn’t think he was falling in love with Alfie meant. There was plenty of evidence that his romantic feelings were like a soldier who was fatally wounded but still stumbling stubbornly on until the final blow came to put them out of their misery. What if Grace’s death had been that final blow? What if Tommy Shelby was officially too broken to ever love again?

It was a million times easier to just have a lot of casual sex than it was to willingly maintain a relationship which would potentially prove his greatest fear true, no matter how much he liked the other person, so that was what he did. He retreated to Birmingham to lead the business and plot the family’s release from prison. He ignored any telegrams or letters that came from Alfie, and went to the Midland whenever he needed to be reminded that he was a real person who wasn’t incorporeal to anyone who wasn’t his two-year-old.

This went on for months. During this time, he threw himself headlong into work and tried not to think about anything else. It didn’t really work. He could only distract himself during those periods of time when he was actively working. The instant he stopped everything rushed back. After the war, he had dealt with this by smoking opium to ease his way through any moments of downtime. Several times he caught himself seriously considering picking that habit up again. However, Mary had quit—something he couldn’t really blame her for—and Tommy didn’t trust her replacement despite having spent weeks tracking down every dirty secret the new housekeeper had. Despite knowing that Frances was harmless, he could not shake the fear that she would steal Charlie away the instant he let his guard down, which meant that smoking opium was out of the question.

Therefore, the only workable solution was to work as much as possible, which was exactly what he endeavored to do. When he wasn’t working on building the connections and gathering the dirt necessary to get the family out of prison, he was expanding Shelby Company Ltd. and the Peaky Blinders. He still didn’t go back to Small Heath if he could help it, but Lizzie informed him that the people there talked about him like he was the king or God, which was a level of power his starving and desperate child self could never had dreamed of. At least, he thought in the depths of night when things seemed their most hopeless, that was one thing that was going right.

Somewhere along the line, he seemed to have managed to convince people that he didn’t get tired, which seemed a bit ridiculous, especially when it became obvious that these were things even people who knew him well thought. Like many things, however, this was not true. Tommy did get tired, he got very tired, but he had also learned to push aside stupid physical things like exhaustion years before. It didn’t matter if he was tired if there were things that needed to be done, and the last time he’d managed to sleep through the night he’d been somewhere in France, so it didn’t really matter all that much anyway.

Two months after the last time he’d seen Alfie, he went to the Midland after the office. He was a bit hazy on what happened after that, but apparently, he must have passed out on some point, because he woke up in a panic hours after dark. He was a strange bed in a strange room and he had no idea where he was or what was going on. When he finally managed to piece together where he was, he found a note sitting on the bedside table from Teresa telling him to give her fee to the manager when he checked out. She’d also covered him up, which was what told him he must have already been asleep when she left because that wasn’t something he would have ever allowed while conscious. All she’d done was throw some blankets over him, probably just worried that one of the hotel’s clients would catch a chill, but the gesture felt so comforting that he had to admit to himself that he was a lot more starved for human contact than he’d admitted to himself.

He’d known that he needed to get out of bed and get back to Arrow House, but his head ached and his body was so heavy that he’d laid back down for just a moment to catch his breath and gather the strength to move. Next thing he knew he was jerking back awake in another panic, having forgotten where he was again. This time he managed to get up and leave the hotel, but he didn’t return to Arrow House. Instead he got in his car, drove to London and was knocking on Alfie’s front door as the sun rose.

Alfie answered the door half asleep and extremely grumpy—turned out Alfie Solomons was the kind of person who believed in the importance of beauty sleep. “You’ve been ignoring me for two months,” he growled. “And you show up now of all times? What happened?”

Tommy shrugged. He wasn’t even sure why he’d come here. All he was really sure of was that he had a headache and he kind of wanted to curl up somewhere and hibernate for the rest of his life.

Alfie studied him. He must have looked as tired as he felt, because after a moment, Alfie sighed and opened the door wider. “Come on in, then,” he said, grudgingly. “You kind of look like you’re going to fall over anyway.”

They ended up in Alfie’s bedroom. Tommy had a vague memory of being led there by the hand, though he couldn’t say for certain if that had actually happened. He sunk down onto the bed and curled up on his left side, which was the habit he’d formed when his head injury kept him from sleeping on his right side as he had once done. After a moment, Alfie climbed into the bed and sat against the headboard. His hip was pressing against Tommy’s back, and he tried not to snuggle closer too obviously.

“So,” Alfie ventured after a while, but not long enough for Tommy to have succumbed to sleep. “Are you going to give any explanation for this?”

Tommy hummed but didn’t say anything.

“Very enlightening,” Alfie said dryly. “You have to understand what this looks like from my point of view, mate. You just cut me off without any explanation and then fucking ignore me for two months before turning up half dead on my doorstep at the crack of fucking dawn. Are you going to give me any explanation for any of this?”

Tommy grunted. He was mostly asleep by this point; far too far gone to worry about whether or not Alfie was angry.

“Of course, you’re not,” Alfie grumbled, just as Tommy slipped into sleep. “Don’t know why I expected anything else.”

Despite his complaints, Alfie was still in bed reading a book when Tommy jolted out of a nightmare in a heart-racing panic a couple hours later. Instead of doing something drastic, he simply began rambling about whatever trash novel he was reading until Tommy’s breathing returned to normal. Then Alfie got up and went to make breakfast. By the time Tommy worked up the energy to follow him to the kitchen, he was also clear-headed enough to realize just how bad an idea coming here like this had been. However, Alfie kissed him after breakfast, so he figured that meant he’d been forgiven, and he really didn’t want to be alone…

~~~~

“This wedding is a bad idea, Thomas,” Polly said leaning over the desk in his office, her hands braced on the expensive wood. “It’s a catastrophically bad idea.”

Tommy sighed and lit a cigarette to avoid looking at her. “This has to be at least the fiftieth time you’ve said this in the last three days. If it didn’t work the first forty-nine times, what makes you think this time is going to be any more successful?”

Polly heaved a sigh and pushed off the desk. “You’ve taken leave of your senses,” she said, stalking over to the side table where she poured herself a generous glass of whiskey, despite the fact that it was only nine in the fucking morning. “That’s the only explanation for this. You’ve finally gone absolutely fucking mad.”

Tommy sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Pol…”

“That woman spied on us—_on you!_—for months and then betrayed us all,” Polly whirled around to face him again. “And now you’re going to marry her and bring that traitor even deeper into the family because she’s pregnant? That’s insane, Tom! How do you even know the baby is yours?”

“The baby is mine,” Tommy said stubbing out his cigarette and lighting another. Chain smoking was the only thing making dealing with Polly tolerable these last few days.

Polly growled. “I don’t even understand why you’re doing this. When have you ever been an honorable man? Pay for her abortion and send her back to her rich American husband where she belongs!”

Tommy let cigarette smoke hiss out between his teeth. He took a moment to make sure he could keep from shouting before he spoke, “I love Grace, Pol. I’m going to marry her.”

Polly heaved a sigh that sounded a bit like a snarl. Tommy half expected her to throw the very expensive crystal whiskey tumbler in her hand at the wall, but she controlled herself at the last moment. “Of all the women in all the world…” she grumbled.

“I want you to understand one thing,” Tommy said, contemplating getting up and going to get a drink of his own, never mind that it was nine in the morning. Polly had the right idea; this was not the kind of argument one should have sober. “I do not want your opinion about whether or not I should marry Grace. I don’t want or need your permission, but you are family. I don’t know when the wedding is going to be because Grace and I still need to convince Clive to divorce her, but I would like you to be there when it happens.”

Polly downed the whiskey in her glass and poured another. She didn’t say anything, and Tommy waited her out. When she spoke again she sounded much calmer. “I guess it figures that my prayers would be answered in the worst possible way.”

Tommy raised an eyebrow as he lit another cigarette. He couldn’t even begin to fathom what she meant; Polly didn’t always make sense even to him. He tried to ignore the frustration and sense of foreboding the statement caused.

“You know Ada had her first crush before you did?” Polly asked lighting a cigarette of her own.

Tommy shrugged. He and Ada had actually had their first crushes at about the same time, but since he’d never told anyone about being in love with Freddie, Polly obviously had no way of knowing that. “And where are you going with this?” he asked mildly.

“Twenty-three,” Polly said. “That’s how old you were when you fell in love with Greta. Before that there was nothing. Charlie wondered if you might fancy men, but we knew all knew you liked fucking women so it had to be something emotional.” She took a long drag of her cigarette then went on. “I worried that you were repressing all your emotions. Or that you’d had them beaten out of you.”

Tommy felt his shoulders start to get tight and tried to relax them before it became obvious. Polly understood him best out of everyone in the family, which wasn’t saying much under ordinary circumstances, but she was capable of noticing his tension. He did not want her knowing she’d hit a nerve.

Tommy’s teenaged fears about inhumanity were like a murder victim buried in a shallow grave, out of sight for now but waiting for one heavy rainstorm to wash up again. Over the years he’d trained himself not to think about it unless it was absolutely necessary, but that did not change the fact that how he loved was wrong. People were not supposed to only catch feelings once and a while and only with people they’d formed deep connections with. That was not how it was supposed to work. Tommy could spend the rest of his life ignoring it, but that did not change the fact that he must be broken or inhumane or somehow made wrong, because those were the only explanations for him being the way he was.

“Your father was a bastard,” Polly said. “I knew that, but I thought there was nothing I could do to fix it. Still, I knew. And I knew you took a lot of the flack for what Arthur, John and Ada did, and I was glad you were looking out for them. Perhaps I should have been more worried about what it was doing to you, but you also seemed so in control. Nothing that man did ever seemed to touch you. I thought you were fine, that he couldn’t manage to break you, and I’m sorry for that.”

Tommy pressed his lips together and gripped the arms of his chair so tightly his knuckles turned white. His stomach was in knots the way it always was in times of great stress. There would be no alcohol for him at any point in this conversation because he knew from experience he wouldn’t be able to keep it down. Hell, given how long it would take his stomach to calm down after this he probably wouldn’t be able to eat at all today.

“I probably shouldn’t even be apologizing to you,” Polly said. “I knew things were wrong. I should have done something about them at the time.”

Tommy’s mum and grandad had both killed themselves in the space between Tommy’s tenth birthday and his eleventh, and the leadership of the Peaky Blinders had passed to his father. Polly had been sixteen and the trouble she’d had keeping Arthur Sr. from driving the Peaky Blinders into the ground made the problems Tommy had keeping his Arthur in line look like a picnic. It made sense that Polly hadn’t had time to police Arthur Sr.’s relationship with his children too. It did. The fact that she hadn’t was something Tommy had been training himself not to resent her for so long that he forgot the resentment existed most of the time.

“I suppose it seems hypocritical of me to be disapproving of you marrying Grace when you say you love her and I spent so long worrying you weren’t capable of loving,” Polly was still rattling on. Tommy clenched his teeth and fought the urge to cover his ears like a child. Polly was not saying anything he hadn’t already thought of and he most certainly did not need her parroting his fears and insecurities back to him. “But still, there are better women in the world, and it would-”

“Pol, shut up!” Tommy finally lost the battle with shouting. Some of his internal turmoil must have been audible in his voice, because Polly jumped and she was near impossible to startle. Tommy found himself on his feet, though he didn’t remember moving. He’d dropped his cigarette onto a pile of papers and it was starting to smolder, but that seemed like a distant concern in the face of getting Polly to stop talking. He took a deep breath through his teeth and tried to speak in a calmer tone of voice. “I don’t want to hear anything more about this,” he said. He didn’t really succeed at speaking calmly, but at least Lizzie wouldn’t hear from her desk just outside of his office. “I am going to marry Grace whether you like it or not. I would like for you to be there, but if the thought of that is too repugnant for you, then so be it.”

Polly was staring at him with her mouth open. It was hard to put a look of utter shock like that on Pol’s face, and Tommy hadn’t managed it in years because it was hard to shock someone who generally assumed the worst of you. “Tom,” she began in a strangled tone. “Your cigarette-”

“Also.” Tommy went on, because he felt like he was seconds from losing his ability to speak. “I never want to hear about the other stuff again. I don’t care what you think about it or how badly you feel about it. I never want you to utter a word about it again. In my presence or anyone else’s.”

“Alright,” Polly said. She might have said something else, but Tommy had looked down and noticed that she had been right to try to warn him about his cigarette because it had indeed set the paperwork it had landed on alight. He swept the papers onto the floor, singeing the sleeve of his expensive jacket in the process. It took him almost five minutes to finish stomping the flames out, and when he looked up after grimly assessing that the carpeting would have to be replaced Polly was gone. He couldn’t exactly say he that disappointed him.

Business went on in the face of all hardships, so Tommy tried to get back to work. That was difficult because he couldn’t focus. He also kept dropping and fumbling his pen and couldn’t get his handwriting to be even a little legible. When he finally gave up and left for the day, it was hard to keep the car steady as he drove to the hotel he was paying for Grace to stay in until he could find a house for them—he would not let her stay at Watery Lane both because of his own pride and because if she and Polly ever ran across each other by accident someone would probably end up dead. He was annoyed, but couldn’t figure out why this was happening until Grace commented and he realized he still hadn’t stopped shaking.

~~~~

Rescuing the family was moving forward painfully slowly. Tommy just wanted to get this over with. He knew enough about how prisons functioned not to want the family in there a moment longer than possible, but it was becoming increasingly obvious that he was both playing an extremely long game and racing the clock. It was not a fun experience.

The problem with the whole thing was that the family had actually done the things they were accused of, and they were all known gangsters so no judge could ever be convinced they hadn’t. It was all very clever on Section D’s part, Tommy had to hand it to them. He could tell they either thought the outcome was assured or had lost interest, because he hadn’t heard from them in months. Whatever the cause of their silence was, it made it much easier to do the only thing which could possibly save Polly, Arthur, John and Michael now: all out blackmail.

Tommy had blackmailed a lot of people in the past thirty years, but he had never blackmailed a member of the government. Luckily, it wasn’t much different in practice than any other blackmailing, it was just that the repercussions would be much, much harsher if he fucked something up.

Fortunately, he had no intentions of fucking up.

Not fucking up required a lot of research on members of the Parliament and judges which would be involved in the case. He did as much research as he could and then headed to London to get a feel for the situation and the men he needed to outsmart firsthand. The day was productive, but the migraine that crept up on him throughout the day had him vomiting his guts in the men’s room of Parliament by late afternoon which was probably the single most humiliating thing which had ever happened to him.

Since his run-in with Father Hughes headaches had become an inescapable side effect of existence. If he didn’t wake up with a headache, he had one by the time he went to bed. Most of the time they were dull headaches which were easy enough to ignore, but the migraines were something different. At first, they had rendered him bedridden, barely able to think or breathe, but they were a bit better now, not amazing, but at least he could sort of keep going if he needed to.

That was what he did, but finishing his business and returning to his car, took most of his strength. He sat behind the wheel for a long time, eyes closed tight against the much too bright light of the setting sun, stomach churning. He felt like someone was driving an ice pick into his brain.

He wasn’t sure what to do now. He was supposed to go to Alfie’s tonight, but he’d made those plans days ago, long before he realized he was going to have the king of all headaches. Going to Alfie’s would end in sex, and Tommy was not in the mood. He supposed to could plead a sudden emergency back in Birmingham and cancel, but the idea of driving all the way back to Warwickshire with the sun setting sounded like hell. He couldn’t very well cancel and then rent a hotel room either, because Alfie would probably figure out about it, and would likely not be pleased. Tommy might still be panicking about whether or not he was in falling in love with Alfie, but he liked his and Alfie’s arrangement and he didn’t want to mess it up just because he did something which caused Alfie to jump to the wrong conclusions. Therefore, his choices were between going back to Arrow House or going to Alfie’s.

He tried to open his eyes and the light seared his eyes. He squeezed them shut again. Yeah, he wasn’t going to make it back to Warwickshire. Alfie’s it was then.

One of the odd things about Alfie was that the delight of seeing someone he liked never seemed to wear off. He always reacted to Tommy knocking on his front door with the same enthusiasm as he had the first time. It made the whole arrangement more reassuring, because he never had to wonder whether Alfie was happy to see him.

Today, Alfie let him into the house and was immediately kissing him. Tommy tried to kiss back like nothing was wrong, but that was hard when all he could think about was finding a cool, dark place to rest until his head stopped trying to split in half. Not for the last time he cursed his stupidity in letting himself be maneuvered into the priest’s plot and so grievously injured.

Things progressed quickly after that, especially once Tommy claimed that he had eaten a big lunch and therefore wasn’t hungry. That wasn’t really true since he hadn’t eaten lunch at all, but he was so nauseous that even the scent of food was a bad idea. Instead he let Alfie lead him upstairs, feeling vaguely relieved at managing to avoid that at least.

He was aware he wasn’t acting normal, but he hadn’t been able to tell if Aflie had noticed until twenty minutes later when they were kissing on the bed. Suddenly Alfie lifted himself up on his hands and knees and stared down into Tommy’s face, his lips pursed in concentration.

“What?” Tommy asked, trying to squint too obviously, the bedroom curtains were open just a few inches and the stripe of light that fell across the sheets was torturous.

“You alright, mate?” Alfie asked.

“I’m fine,” Tommy said, his voice coming out a bit sharper than it would have if he had actually been fine.

“Really?” Alfie said. “Doesn’t look that way to me.” He was studying Tommy like he was fitting all the pieces together and coming up with an answer he didn’t like. It was uncomfortable. Regardless of the face Alfie presented to the world, he was very intelligent and didn’t miss much. It wasn’t nice to be reminded that he was more than capable of seeing through any of Tommy’s lies. “You look a bit like you’ve got a headache,” he said after a moment more thought. “The light hurting your eyes?”

“Lay off it,” Tommy said. “You were kissing me a minute ago. Go back to that.”

But it was obvious that Alfie was no longer in the mood either. He got off the bed and crossed to the window. He pulled it all the way closed, cutting off the shaft of light. Tommy couldn’t completely suppress a sigh of relief. It wasn’t like his headache got much better, but it was a lot easier to think when he wasn’t being blinded by light.

“Yeah, I thought so,” Alfie said. “You ever planning to tell me that you got migraines, Tommy boy?”

“I never said I got migraines,” Tommy said, sitting up because it felt less submissive even though the change in position made him dizzy. His jaw was tight with pain. He wished that Alfie would just go away and let him try to sleep if they weren’t going to make out.

“Yeah, you wouldn’t,” Alfie leaned back against his dresser and crossed his arms. “Luckily for you, I can read between the lines. And that I know you don’t crack open your fucking skull and then be completely fine in three months. Besides this and the glasses, is there anything else you haven’t told me?”

Tommy was not about to tell him about the memory problems. He trusted Alfie about as much as he trusted anyone at this point, but that was different than saying he was stupid enough to admit to something like that when his brain was his greatest asset.

“I can’t tell if you’re glaring at me or just in too much pain to keep your eyes open,” Alfie mused. “Lay back down, and I’ll get you a wet cloth for your neck. I’m many things, but I’m not the kind of man who will make out with a sick person.”

It rankled that Alfie was telling him what to do, but it wasn’t like he was really capable of doing much else so he let himself fall backwards onto the bed and rolled over. Alfie padded out of the room, closing the door softly behind him. In a few minutes he was back with a warm, wet cloth he rested across the back of Tommy’s neck. “I’ve got some laudanum too,” he said. “For when my sciatica acts up.”

“I don’t want any laudanum,” Tommy grumbled because that the sensible thing to say, not because it wouldn’t be pretty fucking welcome right now.

Alfie hummed, but didn’t push it. “Thought you might say that, mate,” he said. “Let me know if you change your mind.” Tommy expected him to leave the room, then but he didn’t. He just set himself up on the bed with a book and a couple hours later when Tommy finally broke down and asked for the laudanum, he was still there.

You really had to wonder what Tommy had done to end up with this man.

~~~~

Tommy had never been blind to the various issues which populated his marriage to Grace. He had never been under the impression that things would always be perfect once they finally managed to get married; he knew too much about the world than to think that.

That was different than saying he’d ever considered the possibility Grace might bleed out in his arms.

Even when things were ramping up with the Changrettas, the idea that things might get to that point had never occurred to him. John hadn’t handled the situation well, but the Changrettas hadn’t been a powerful enough force in Birmingham to face the Peaky Blinders in years. Tommy had been on edge from being pushed around by the Russians and Section D, and the idea of stroking Vincente Changretta’s ego was sickening. He’d praised John for not backing down, refused to listen to Polly and paid the ultimate price for it.

Grace had taken a bullet meant for him, that was the worst part of it. She didn’t have to have died. If she’d only been a little further away when the gunman had shown up, she would have lived.

He’d known there was no hope long, long before she’d breathed her last breath. Tommy had been in the war, he knew how to tell when a wound was fatal, and he’d known almost immediately no doctor was ever going to be able to get there fast enough to save her. He hadn’t realized that wasn’t obvious to everyone until Polly came back and kept trying to tell him everything was going to be alright. He’d just looked up at her, and she’d gaped at him as she realized he knew nothing was going to be alright.

Still, having seen enough death to know your spouse’s wounds were fatal did not make the whole situation any easier to deal with. He remembered carrying Grace to the ambulance when it came, and he remembered the moment when she breathed her last, long before they reached the hospital, just as he’d known she would. After that though, there’d been a whole swath of time that he couldn’t remember. He didn’t know how he’d gotten from the hospital back to Arrow House, or how long it had been since Grace’s death, but those questions had seemed somewhat pointless so he’d never asked. Those gaps kept happening until the funeral after which point he was stubbornly stuck in the world again, which was not an easier option.

“Tommy, talk to me for a minute,” Ada cornered him when he came back to the house after a night outside. He did not want to be in the house at all. He’d come by claustrophobia in the tunnels in France, and right now it felt like the walls of Arrow House were closing in around him, which didn’t even make any fucking sense. It was much easier to breathe out in the fields, but he couldn’t just not come back, there was still Charlie to think of.

“What?” he asked Ada when it became obvious she wasn’t going to leave him alone if he didn’t say anything.

“How are you doing?” Ada asked with the kind of look on her face which suggested she already thought she knew the answer. Tommy just glared at her, and didn’t respond. She heaved a sigh. “Tom…”

“I need to check on Charlie,” he said.

“He’s sleeping now and it would be best if you didn’t do anything which might wake him,” Ada said. “He’s been crying on and off all night.”

Neither of them acknowledged that Charlie had been crying for Grace. Charlie knew his mother was gone, but he was too little to understand that she wasn’t coming back. As a result, he kept crying for her, expecting her to come. Since even Tommy couldn’t reliably calm him when he got like that, Ada had probably had to let him cry himself out. She looked exhausted.

“I’m sorry,” he said and he was. He was the only parent Charlie had now, he should have been more available. It was a bit ironic; a lot of the fights he and Grace had had right after Charlie was born had been caused by the fact that on a subconscious level he didn’t trust that she would do anything to care for Charlie without him telling her too. It had taken him a long time to accept the fact that not only did Grace love Charlie as much as he did, but that she would take equal responsibility for his health and wellbeing. Apparently, he’d gotten used to that, which meant he was going to have to reprogram himself now that he was back to being the sole caregiver of a small child.

“Don’t apologize, I’m worried about you,” Ada said. “Did you get any sleep? When was the last time you ate?”

He didn’t think he’d ever eat or sleep again. “I’m fine.”

Ada heaved a sigh bit didn’t seem particularly surprised. “You need to eat, Tom, or at least sit down and have a cup of tea.”

Her steadfastness in the face of his refusal was unexpected. Sometime between the complicated circumstances of her marriage and now she’d changed. The woman who stared at now him like she would not back off until he did as she demanded could not be the same little girl whose hair he had braided every morning for years. Back then she’d beamed up at him like he was her father even though he was nothing more than a child himself, now she looked at him like a sister who was not going to take no for an answer. He did not know how he felt about the change.

“Ada…” He said, trying to come up with the right collection of words to make her go away and leave him alone. It was hard; his head felt like soup.

“Tommy,” she reached out and laid her hand on his arm. It was the first time someone had touched him since the funeral. The touch burned and he instinctively jerked away. She didn’t try to reach out again, but she didn’t back down. “Come sit down. Just for a minute.”

He didn’t want to obey, but Ada was so firm and his whole body was heavy. It was a lot easier to just stop fighting her. “Fine.”

They made their room to the parlor where a tray of tea was already set out. Obviously, Ada had come up with this plot while he was gone and set it into motion as soon as she’d seen him returning. The smell was familiar: chamomile. Polly had kept a tin of the stuff on reserve for emergencies. Whenever something bad had happened at Watery Lane, the chamomile had come out. Tommy wasn’t even sure where Ada had gotten it from; Grace didn’t like chamomile and Tommy didn’t drink it unless something horrible had happened. Maybe the servants had some for themselves.

He sunk down onto the couch, trying not to look as tired as he really was. It was very odd. He knew he was tired, he felt tired, but he also knew that he would never be able to sleep again. He watched vacantly, almost too tired to play at being fully coherent while Ada poured the tea. She put an awful lot of cream and sugar in his cup, but the look she gave him when he wrinkled his nose was so stern he took the cup without comment.

They drank their tea in silence for a while, listening to the quiet sounds of the house and servants around them. Arrow House was overwhelming on a good day, with all the posh furnishings and the servants watching your every move. There had never been any privacy in the Watery Lane house, but at least all the people in your business had been family.

“You know, if you want to talk, Tom,” Ada said after a while. “I’m always around. I know what it’s like.”

He didn’t want to talk and even if he had he wasn’t sure where he would have started. There were so many things he’d wanted to tell Grace, so many things he’d wanted to share with her. There weren’t words to put to something like that.

The nice thing about this conversation happening with Ada was that she knew that and wasn’t really surprised when he didn’t say anything. She did, however, get up and cross over to sit on the coach next to him. She didn’t try to touch him again, though she looked like she wanted to. “I just want to you to know that I’m here if you need me,” she said. “For as long as you need me,” she smiled wirily. “And even when you’ve convinced yourself you don’t.”

Tommy just kept staring down into his cup of tea and said nothing.

~~~~

The problem with the whole affair was that realizing just how good a lover Alfie was only made Tommy more worried about his feelings. They had never discussed whether they were anything more than business partners casually fucking, but it didn’t necessarily feel like Alfie was treating it like that. To be honest, Tommy wasn’t sure he was either. He liked Alfie and enjoyed spending time with him, but he was worried Alfie was falling in love with him when he wasn’t sure he was capable of feeling the same anymore.

He tried to handle it by simply not thinking about it as much as he could, but that was impossible even though he had enough other things to worry about. Eventually, this became overwhelming and came to a head one night after the fights.

He and Alfie had continued going to the fights and it had sort of became their recreational activity. It was especially useful because Alfie had numerous fighters and everyone knew the Peaky Blinders fixed horse races. It was not that unbelievable that two gangsters who both made their money off fixing things would meet at a place like this, which kept people for wondering why two men were going out alone together.

Tommy usually enjoyed the fights and he enjoyed Alfie’s wiry commentary even more, however, this particular day things were not going well from the start. Things with rescuing the family had taken an unexpected setback, and Tommy was upset. He’d left Parliament, gone to the Eden Club and proceeded to lock himself in a private room with a bottle of whiskey. By the time he left the club and went to meet Alfie, he was undeniably tipsy, though a skilled enough actor that he could hide it. Alfie still gave him a piercing look when they met, but he didn’t comment so Tommy figured he was in the clear.

He might have been in the clear, if he had done the sensible thing and stopped drinking, but he didn’t. He couldn’t walk a straight line by the time the fights were over and Alfie had to manhandle him into the car, glaring the whole time.

When they got back to Alfie’s house, Alfie lugged him inside and dumped him on the sofa, before standing over his with his hands fisted on his hips. “Well,” he said. “Are you going to tell me what brought this on?”

“Brought what on?” Tommy asked, audibly slurring his words. He couldn’t even try to pretend to be less drunk than he was, which was somewhat annoying, though he was mostly too far gone to care.

“This,” Alfie gestured at him. “I have seen many, many unexpected things in my day, but I’d never thought I’d live to see Tommy Shelby sloppy drunk. Aren’t you too uptight for this, mate?”

When Tommy didn’t respond he sighed and sank down into an armchair, head thrown back. “I did not get into this relationship to solve your issues, mate,” he said. “But that’s starting to seem necessary. Is there something you want to talk about? We both know there must be something. A man like you doesn’t just go and get blind drunk for no reason at all, especially since it can’t be easy to imbibe enough spirits in a short enough period of time to get you like this, given you drink the stuff like water on a usual basis.” He paused as if waiting for Tommy to say something and when he didn’t he sighed and went on, “Are things going that badly with trying to save your family?”

Tommy tensed. He’d never actually told Alfie he was trying to get the family out of prison, though in retrospect he supposed it had probably been obvious. “Fuck off,” he slurred.

“Fine, not my business I suppose,” Alfie said holding up his hands. “Though we’ve been fucking for months now, I guess it would only make sense if I cared what was upsetting you.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.” The words were out of Tommy’s mouth before he realized he was saying them and long before he considered whether he should say them.

“And why shouldn’t I care about what upsets you?” Alfie asked. “Do you think me to be so heartless that wouldn’t matter to me?”

“It sure as hell would be a lot easier if you were,” Tommy grumbled. He should stop talking, but he couldn’t.

“And why would that be?” Alfie said. He was getting angry now. “Because I’m failing to see how you can say something like that and not expect me to be fucking insulted.”

Tommy Shelby drank a lot, that was no secret, but he very rarely got truly drunk, and one of the reasons for this was that it was always hard to control what you were going to say when you were shitfaced. That was what happened here. Tommy knew he shouldn’t say anything, but he couldn’t stop himself. The words slipped out despite of his better judgment. “Because it would be a lot easier to be a heartless monster if you didn’t care!”

The room went so silent that Tommy could hear the house settling. Alfie’s mouth opened and closed a couple times before he finally spoke. When he did his voice was slow and soothing, like he was talking to a spooked horse. “Alright, mate, obviously I’m missing some vital information here, so why don’t you sit down and fill me in.”

Tommy didn’t remember standing up, but he now realized that he was on his swaying back and forth with drunken dizziness. “I’m going back to Birmingham,” he said, trying and mostly failing to keep from slurring.

“If you get behind the wheel of a car right now you will wreck,” Alfie said. “I’m not having your life and the lives of any poor fools you hit on my conscience. Sit down and I’ll make some tea.”

Tommy sat down.

Alfie left and was back in what seemed like far too short a time. Possibly he was worried Tommy would flee the instant his back was turned. He poured the cups and handed one to Tommy before taking his own. The tea was chamomile, though Tommy was fairly sure Alfie didn’t know about the family’s traditions regarding the stuff so it must have just been coincidence. He sipped at the tea mostly so he didn’t have to look at Alfie.

“Alright,” Alfie said after he must have decided Tommy wasn’t going to be the one to start the conversation. “Two questions. One: Who told Tommy Shelby he was a heartless monster? And two: Why the fuck did Tommy Shelby believe them?”

Tommy fought the urge to throw the teacup he was holding across the room. This was not a conversation he had ever wanted to have with anyone, let alone Alfie Solomons. “Lay off it, Alfie,” he said. “I’m drunk. I didn’t know what I was saying.”

Alfie snorted. “The fact that you’re using that as an excuse makes me doubt that.” When Tommy didn’t respond, he leaned forward some frustration seeping back into his posture. “Tell me what’s going on. I’m not going to let you weasel your way out of this one.”

“I’m not in love with you,” Tommy said, the words burst out of him and he cursed himself. He really needed to make sure he never got this drunk around anyone else ever again.

“Okay,” Alfie said, like it didn’t matter. “I’m not in love with you either, mate. I don’t see how that’s a problem; this thing’s mostly casual and even if it wasn’t it hasn’t been anywhere enough time to start throwing words like ‘love’ around.”

“You don’t understand,” Tommy said. “I’m not in love with you. I may never fall in love with you. I-” he knew he should stop talking but the words poured out of him. He’d bottled them up for years, but it seemed like now that he was given space to express them they just poured out. “I don’t even like you in a romantic way at all. I’m attracted to you physically and I like sleeping with you, but emotionally all my feelings are friendship feelings.”

“Alright,” Alfie said in a tone of voice that suggested he was hurt and trying not to show it. “That’s okay.”

Tommy barely noticed. Somehow, he’d gotten on his feet again, and he paced back and forth even though the movement made him dizzy. “But it’s not okay. I need to fall in love with you,” he said. “I need to.”

“That doesn’t make any sense, Tom,” Alfie said. “You don’t _need_ to fall in love with anyone.”

“It does,” Tommy stopped pacing and tried to look back at Alfie, but he couldn’t make eye contact when he finally said it, “I’m fucked up. I’ve only ever had romantic feelings for three people: my best friend, the girl I was going to marry before the war, and Grace. If I can’t fall in love again that proves I’m finally too broken to come back from.”

Silence fell after he finished speaking. After a minute he managed to look in Alfie’s direction. Alfie didn’t look hurt anymore, he looked like he was walking on thin ice and contemplating the best way forward.

“So, let me make sure I’m understanding this correctly,” Alfie said. “You’ve only ever had sappy romantic feelings for three people in the whole thirty-some years you’ve been alive, and you’re afraid that means you’re a heartless monster?”

Tommy bristled as the use of the word “afraid” but it wasn’t like he could argue with the rest of the description. He nodded.

“God, this night is not going anywhere near like I thought it would,” Alfie groaned. “Sit down before you fall down, Thomas, and I’ll pour you some more tea.”

Tommy wanted to run for his life, but he could tell by the look Alfie gave him that wasn’t an option so he went back to the sofa and sat down. His shoes crunched on glass. He looked down and saw that he had dropped his first teacup when he’d gotten up. “Sorry-” he began but Alfie waved a hand.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ll be just a minute.” He heaved himself out of his armchair and vanished into the kitchen only to return a moment later with another cup and saucer. He poured Tommy another cup before settling back into his chair.

“So,” he said. “First things first; you’re not a heartless monster if you never fall in love with me,” he said. “Actually, you’re not a heartless monster for only ever being in love with three people. You wouldn’t even be a heartless monster if you’d never been in love with anyone.”

“Love is what makes us human,” Tommy said.

Alfie snorted. “Love doesn’t make us human. You’re human because you’re human. People don’t get to make decisions about your humanity based on whether or not you experience life the way they think you should.”

Tommy didn’t say anything so Alfie pushed on. “You know, I’ve met other people who feel the way you do over the years,” he said. “I’ve met people who don’t have romantic feelings at all. People who don’t have sexual feelings. People who don’t have either. People who have one or both but only under certain circumstances. People who can’t distinguish what they’re feeling. I’ve met all sorts. It’s not abnormal. It happens.”

Tommy didn’t know what to say. Sure, he’d known about Greta, but he’d never considered if there were more people like that, or people who felt even less than they did. The thought was momentarily comforting until the weight of reality crashed back down onto him. “I’m sure it was different for them,” he said. “I’m sure they weren’t broken.”

“You’re not broken,” Alfie said. He sounded so vehement Tommy looked up at him in surprise. “I refuse to believe that any of us who went to that hellhole they call France are.”

“I was broken long before the war,” he said. “How else would you explain how I ended up like this?”

“Have you ever considered the possibility that you’re not broken?” Alfie said. “Have you ever considered that maybe this is just the way you are?”

“That’s not possible,” Tommy breathed.

“I just told you that I’ve met other people like you,” Alfie said. “Obviously it is. You’ve just spent your whole life convincing yourself that there has to be something abnormal about the way you are so you’re incapable of considering that maybe this is the just the way you are. Maybe this is the way Tommy Shelby was meant to be. _And-_” he said holding up a finger before Tommy could say anything, “even if this was somehow related to whatever tragic childhood you’ve never brought up around me before, I’m not sure how much that would change. This is still the way you experience life, and saying ‘I’m broken and that’s why I feel this way’ isn’t going to make your experience any different. All its going to do is make you hate yourself on top of everything else, and that’s not constructive. Either way a bit of self-acceptance is in order.”

“But what if it never happens again?” Tommy asked. “What if this is it? What if now that-” he tried to say her name and almost choked. “Grace is gone I can’t ever love again?”

“So, what if you can’t?” Alfie asked. “That’s not the end of the world. Besides, your wife just died. You need to give yourself time to grieve, and I doubt that this type of obsessing if helping any.”

“But-” Tommy began.

“But nothing,” Alfie said. “You need to grieve. Maybe when you’re done, you’ll fall in love again, and maybe you won’t, but whatever happens says nothing about whether you’re human. That’s not the way it works.”

Tommy stared down into his teacup for a long time, trying to figure out what to say. There were so many objections he felt like he should make, but he could tell Alfie wasn’t going to listen to any of them.

“That make sense, mate?” Alfie asked.

Tommy shrugged.

“Well, think on it,” Alfie said. “I can’t make you accept yourself, but I really think you’d probably be a happier man if you did.”

“Alright,” Tommy breathed.

“Good,” Alfie said. “Now give me your teacup. The tea’s gone cold. That conversation manage to sober you up any, mate?”

Tommy shrugged and handed the teacup over. Alfie topped it off and handed it back. He drank it without complaint. The familiar flowery flavor filled his mouth, reminding him of both myriad tragedies but also myriad gestures of comfort. He found he was actually glad this was the kind of tea they were drinking tonight.

“So,” Alfie said, leaning back in his chair. His tone had changed, most of the seriousness leaving his voice. “What do you know about beekeeping, mate?

“_What?_” Tommy asked, wondering if he’d missed something.

“Beekeeping,” Alfie said, sipping his own tea. “Fascinating subject really. You see, beekeepers-” and just like that everything between them was back to normal. It was one of the most comforting things which had happened that whole night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading this fic. I hope you enjoyed it. 
> 
> (Also, one of these days I might finally manage to write a fic that Grace actually appears in. I fully intended for her to be in this one, but somehow it didn't happen.)


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